San Juan Puerto Rico

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Details: Written by: Richard_McKie; Parent Category: Travel; Category: North America; Published: 28 October 2023; Hits: 4755

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San Juan, Puerto Rico, has an interesting fort and a pretty township. I kept hearing 'America' from West Side Story playing in my head.

Once a giant Spanish Fort, San Juan resisted all comers, including the British, until the United States bombarded it from the sea, then landed a ground force and took it, as they did in Cuba and Hispaniola. Unlike those islands, the US has held it ever since, as it remained, until WW2, strategically key to the naval control of the Caribbean.

Now I'm hearing America again.

"I like the city of San Juan
I know a boat you can get on"

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Travel

Cambodia and Vietnam

In April 2010 we travelled to the previous French territories of Cambodia and Vietnam: ‘French Indochina’, as they had been called when I started school; until 1954. Since then many things have changed. But of course, this has been a region of change for tens of thousands of years. Our trip ‘filled in’ areas of the map between our previous trips to India and China and did not disappoint. There is certainly a sense in which Indochina is a blend of China and India; with differences tangential to both. Both have recovered from recent conflicts of which there is still evidence everywhere, like the smell of gunpowder after fireworks.

Fiction, Recollections & News

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Now the long-awaited second part has been released.

Directed by Denis Villeneuve
Screenplay by Denis Villeneuve, Jon Spaihts
Based on Dune by Frank Herbert
Starring Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Josh Brolin, Austin Butler' Florence Pugh, Dave Bautista
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Cinematography Greig Fraser, Edited by Joe Walker
Music by Hans Zimmer
Running time 165 minutes

Opinions and Philosophy

Science, Magic and Religion

(UCLA History 2D Lectures 1 & 2)

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The lectures raise a lot of interesting issues. For example in Lecture 1, dealing with pre-history, it is convincingly argued that 'The Secret', promoted by Oprah, is not a secret at all, but is the natural primitive human belief position: that it is fundamentally an appeal to magic; the primitive 'default' position.

But magic is suppressed by both religion and science. So in our modern secular culture traditional magic has itself been transmogrified, magically transformed, into mysticism.

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